The Cambridge introduction to creative writing

Composition and creative writing
115
Workshops as open spaces
One of the jobs of a creative writing programme is to give new writers the time to develop themselves and their work. One of the ways to accelerate that process and save their time is through the writing workshop, although there are other approaches that simply require the writer to be alone in a room,
remain there and get on with it. In industry and craft, workshops are places for innovation, creation and production. In creative writing, the function of the workshop depends upon the intents and character of the tutor, and upon the context of the event, such as it being a scheduled part of a university degree.
There are of course workshops in other contexts. I have witnessed writing workshops in bars, parks, zoos, galleries, medical schools, hospitals, trains,
nature reserves, museums, mountaintops and, of course, schools and arts festivals.
Purposes
Workshops serve many purposes, one of which is less visible but very important:
the creation of a community of writers. Obviously, you do not need a workshop to start such a community – and workshops are recent phenomena – but they do act as a model that complements and even subverts previous models, such as the salon, the art school, the coffeehouse reading and the soiree. The meetings of the Lake Poets, of the Bloomsbury Group, of the Beats, of the Dadaists, of the Surrealists, and soon, were, essentially, workshops by a different name.
Writing programmes mimic the phenomenon known as a literary movement. Their movements are united by their place and time, sometimes by a philosophy of teaching, sometimes by a philosophy of artistic practice. A workshop, like a literary assemblage or movement, serves as a catalyst for the careers of several writers, some of whom will become close friends, some of whom will become the preeminent and the most unswervingly severe critics of each other’s work.
Literary friendships of this type have enormous cultural muscle and historical significance. The workshop is one basis for such afresh literary network. It creates a peer group, members of which support each other long after the formal meetings are completed. Whom anew writer meets in a writing workshop may well be their professional and personal friends for life. That nexus can also help them later on in their literary career, when they are either too bigheaded for their own good and need bringing down to earth, or they are burned out on failure or benighted by experiment, and require an honest, helping hand,
such as anew agent, a publisher, a reading, or even a job. What are required

116
Creative writing
are connections. Workshops create connections. They can even become cults.
Some would call these networks friendships. They are, but many friendships tend to be fellowships founded on self-interest, mutual curiosity and cultural symbiosis. The fellowships of writers are almost like cults or clubs:
fiercely competitive yet strenuously generous to those inside them, rebarba- tive to those outside the magic circle, or to those writers who have strayed or grown beyond the pale. The bonds between writers in these fellowships are powerful because they have shared the same experience of apprenticeship they were tested together. They have witnessed a common vulnerability become a shared purpose they have understood the way in which apprentices grow into experts.
These invisible networks exist in a kind of counterculture, in a world that parallels and mocks the more serious social and political networks that lend themselves as the subject of many novels. In some countries, there are overlaps between these cultural and political networks what began in youth as pleasure and application later yields friends in high or right places. Never believe anybody who tells you that literary networks are not important to a writer’s work,
profile and audience. They are circles for survival.
The visible purpose of workshops is improvement of work. The essential aspiration for all workshop leaders is to help students discover not only what works but also what succeeds. The stratagem for exploring that concern is shared experience. Writing is a lonely business workshops help you access other people’s experience and strategies for writing. Workshops also palliate the loneliness of the writer, although one must be wary about getting too used to this palliation, since a great deal of honest writing emerges from the lack of it. The crucial but unvoiced aim of the lead-writer is to help new writers write better than they think they know, and to learn to appreciate that process collectively. The best workshops have simple, rather than subtle, purposes.
Origins
Writing workshops were born out of theatre writing which, like any performance-based medium, is necessarily more collaborative than writing.
Their origin lies in the teaching of dramatic technique. The playwright George
Baker (1866–1935) ran his ‘47 Workshop at Harvard from 1906 to 1925, the purpose of which was to show the inexperienced dramatist how experienced dramatists have solved problems similar to his own, to shorten a little the time of his apprenticeship (Myers 69). They were open spaces the emphasis

Download 2.89 Mb.

Share with your friends: